Reading my newsfeed this morning I noticed several articles talking about the cloud and the enterprise. There is no doubt that the area is heating up with more and more acquisitions (IBM buys Softlayer), investments (GE invests $105M in Pivotal) and fights over big deals (IBM vs. AWS for the CIA cloud) but the question that comes up is: «Are the cloud platforms ready for the enterprise?»
Being involved with numerous cloud projects I see five areas that enterprises emphasize when they evaluate their options. Those are not too different from the criteria they use for any other software offering but here is the cloud run-down.